Tasty Korean barbecue in Garden Grove: Mo Ran Gak

My meal at Mo Ran Gak in Garden Grove was excellent. Perhaps part of the reason I liked it so much is that I can’t get really good Korean barbecue where I live. It’s certainly worth bringing to the attention of other foodies.As a barbecue place, they bring the meat to your table and cook it, although in my case as a lone diner they cooked in it in the kitchen and brought it out. When you arrive, they bring you a carafe of water and a metal pot filled with broth. It looks like a teapot but it’s a broth inside. And it’s tasty.My waitress recommended the short rib (gal bi) with the bones removed. It was also tasty. The high quality of the meat shows. They obviously also do some marinating in soy sauce. The idea is that you take a chunk of meat and wrap either in rice paper or the thin circular slice of white radish and then dip it into one of the two sauces they provide.Now we’re at what for me was the real revelation of this meal: One sauce was a chili sauce, which was nice. The other was sesame oil and salt and I don’t know what else. This was off-the-charts good for me. This sauce is addictive. I’ve had sauces at other Korean places but none were this good. I don’t remember any of those but I really remember this one. I’m going to have to check out sesame oil now. I wonder if there are different grades, like olive oil.The great thing about Korean meals is that they bring so many other nice foods. I had a nice small bowl of tasty soup to start. And they bring small dishes called banchan that give you little tastes of different things. I got two seaweed dishes, one covered in mayonnaise, and both were good. I also got two versions of kim chee, a spicy pickled cabbage and one other spicy pickled vegetable, bean sprouts and the only banchan I didn’t like, anchovies. They also gave me a standard green salad.I mentioned I was there to try something different and they were nice enough to bring me a tasty seafood pancake. Service was good here. Several of the staff are fluent in English, which makes it different than some other Korean places I’ve tried in Garden Grove.